Business Articles

Three Types of People to Fire Immediately

Sun Nov 27 01:35:47 +0000 2011

"These people—and we going to talk about three specific types in a minute—passive-aggressively block innovation from happening and will suck the energy out of any organization. When confronted with any of the following three people—and you have found it impossible to change their ways, say goodbye."

Tags: staffing

Seth's Blog: How to get a job with a small company

Tue Nov 01 05:00:34 +0000 2011

"All the growth (and your best chance to get hired) is from companies you’ve probably never heard of. And when the hirer is also the owner, the rules are very different."

Tags: seth recruitment

Rands In Repose: Bored People Quit

Mon Jul 18 01:02:08 +0000 2011

"There are many reasons other than boredom that someone will quit. Your company might suck or be headed towards suck. This person might randomly get an offer that fulfills their life’s dream. There is a bevy of unpredictable reasons that someone will leave, but boredom is an aspect of their daily professional life you can not only easily assess, but also fix. More importantly, boredom is not initially catastrophic. Boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore."

Tags: management staffing

Rethinking how we 'conference'

Wed Jun 15 04:27:44 +0000 2011

"Most conferences are put together according to formulas designed decades ago, in an era before blackberries and information overwhelm, with scant attention paid to how the brain digests new ideas. However with a few tweaks, conferences could be a lot more fun and useful for everyone."

Tags: conferences creativity psychology

12 of the Best About Us Pages on the Internet

Tue Feb 15 00:59:55 +0000 2011

"In this post I am going to show you what I consider to be 12 of the best About Us pages on the internet. I’m going to go through them all, one by one, and show you what makes them so good. "

Tags: webdesign

Seth's Blog: What's the use case?

Thu Feb 10 11:39:47 +0000 2011

Too often, we're in such a hurry to show off what we'd like to build we forget to sell the notion of what we built it for.

Annotations:

Too often, we're in such a hurry to show off what we'd like to build we forget to sell the notion of what we built it for.

Tags: seth marketing

4 factors for webpreneurs

Sun Feb 06 12:53:41 +0000 2011

"The vast majority of web startups fail because they don’t find enough customers, at the right price and in enough time before they run out of cash. If we spend as much time on marketing your startup as you do on writing and shipping your code, and we just might beat the odds."

Tags: sales marketing

Best Presentations of the Decade

Wed Dec 22 05:32:52 +0000 2010

Tags: presenting

Sole Proprietors Struggle to Generate New Business

Tue Dec 21 00:02:51 +0000 2010

"More than a third of sole proprietors say their greatest challenge is finding the time and resources to generate new business, according to a new survey. While more than half of respondents said that hiring an additional employee would allow them to focus more on growing their business and generating new revenue, 69% cannot add any staff due to budget constraints."

Tags: sales sole-proprietorship

Seth's Blog: Better than nothing (is harder than you think)

Thu Sep 02 10:39:45 +0000 2010

"Most of the time, particulary in b2b and luxury sales, the competition is nothing. "I will buy this treat or I will buy nothing, because I don't really need anything." "I will buy your consulting services, or I'll continue doing what I'm doing now on that front, which is nothing.""

Tags: seth marketing

The Top Idea in Your Mind

Thu Jul 22 12:52:34 +0000 2010

"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower."

Tags: creativity ideas

11 new ways to be a better boss

Wed Jul 07 12:37:59 +0000 2010

"What's the secret to being a great boss? What are the best ways to motivate staff? How do you turn your business into an ideas factory? In the old days, it was all about providing employees with perks and rewarding the most talented with generous pay packets. Companies would delegate and empower but everyone knew the boss was in charge. But the world has changed. With the recovery, more employees will be moving on and companies will need to work out ways of keeping them without breaking the bank. With the skills shortage, talent is hard to find. Companies are emerging from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and are looking for talent to drive new opportunities while keeping costs down."

Tags: culture leadership creativity staffing

The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People

Mon Jun 28 08:56:30 +0000 2010

"The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking. An established habit, whether getting ready for work in the morning or having a whiskey after, is a pattern of behavior we’ve adopted—we stick to it regardless of whether it made sense when we initially adopted it, and whether it makes sense to continue with it years later. From a human irrationality perspective this means that something we do “just once” can wind up becoming a habit and part of our activities for a longer time than we envisioned. To get some insight into this process, consider the following experiment:"

Tags: psychology

6 Ways to Keep Your Rising Stars on Track

Fri Jun 18 06:29:02 +0000 2010

"You may think it's safe to assume your rising stars are also highly excited and committed to your company, but Jason Martin and Conrad Schmidt's research suggests otherwise. Over the past six years, they studied over 20,000 "emerging stars" at more than 100 organizations worldwide. Considering the statistics that came out of the study, you may want to rethink any assumptions you have regarding your high potentials:"

Tags: management staffing culture

How to Fix a Toxic Workplace

Fri Jun 11 04:47:14 +0000 2010

"Leaders of good companies aspire to create workplace heavens. Leaders of workplace hells face more daunting challenges, and many will be lucky to achieve purgatory. But how do you reform a bad culture?"

Tags: staffing culture

Does Top-notch Employee Talent Transfer to Other Jobs?

Sun May 30 03:52:41 +0000 2010

"The business world is obsessed with "talent" -- hiring it, retaining it, rewarding it. We're urged to "get the right people on the bus." (And, really, what better symbol of the high-performing enterprise than a bus?) The metaphor implies that good workers are portable units of competence. They can bring their talent to your bus or your competitor's bus, but ultimately, it's their prize to bestow. What if talent is more like an orchid, thriving in certain environments and dying in others? It's an interesting question, full of nature-versus-nurture overtones; we could debate it endlessly. But Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spoiled the debate with an unsporting move. He's gathered some data. And what he discovered forces us to rethink the argument."

Tags: management staffing leadership

Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees

Sun May 30 03:38:44 +0000 2010

"Believe it or not, the mere thought of you can make your employees do a lousy job. In fact, if your employees consider you a controlling person, even an unconscious thought of you can have a negative effect on their performance."

Tags: management psychology staffing

Do you make these five critical mistakes in business?

Fri May 07 08:30:25 +0000 2010

"Why do some businesses achieve profound success, while other similar businesses seem to struggle forever? Even though many businesses have great products and quality services, they never seem to really get beyond mere survival level. Here are five critical mistakes that will kill your chances of attaining above-average success. If you make any of them, your business will achieve average performance at best, and likely create a trap where you end up working long hours for mere survival, or even eventual failure and bankruptcy. Read on and check to see how many you make."

Tags: strategy

How great leaders inspire action

Thu Feb 10 14:27:43 +0000 2011

"Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers -- and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling. "

Tags: leadership strategy marketing inspiration why

Why Businesses Don't Experiment

Thu Apr 29 10:26:31 +0000 2010

"Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward."

Tags: risk research marketing